I’ve animated cars just by moving them along and making the keyframe… I did a scene with police car, ambulance and fire truck… but after rendering… and watching it… realized no people driving the vehicle… I have a person that is rigged to put in the car… what is best way to get the person and the car to move in sync so he looks like he is driving the car… I tried to move the person and set the keyframes to match the car, but didn’t work too good… I did one last year but didn’t have the man rigged… I just did the person from the waist up and joined him to the car…
is it better to do a person from waist up in the car and drive it and then when you want him to get out of the car, go to another scene where the car is stopped and he gets out?
thanks
Build and rig your person - I would use MakeHuman and specify the Rigify rig.
Put him/her in the car and pose the character to be driving the car.
Add Child Of constraint to the root bone of the character with the car as the target - set the influence to 1
Now the character does everything the car does. When you want the character to get out - set and keyframe, the Child Of constraint influence to 0 and then repose/move him/her.
You can have multiple Child Of constraints so the character could get our of one car and then get into another - just change the influences accordingly.
Cheers, Clock.
Great… thank you so much… my first time trying to made a person follow the car without joining to the car… will try it out… appreciate your help…
have a great day
okay… put my character in the vehicle, put on the “Child of…” constraint to the root bone… put the vehicle as the target… but the influence has to be .000 to keep the person sitting in the vehicle… but the person doesn’t move with the car… If I set the influence to 1.000, the person is outside the vehicle stretched out… not getting it to work for some reason… I"ve tried making the vehicle child of the hip bone with influence .000 and this keeps the man in the vehicle, but still will not move together… file is too big to post…
I’ve been searching online for a tutorial but not finding one…
thanks
I put my ambulance and driver into a file alone… here it is…
Now this is nothing fancy… just for small animation video am doing… cartoon type…
something I discovered also when I closed the file to send after saving… when I re-opened the file to keep playing with it… the vehicle changed position… it turned so the driver was outside the vehicle… no clue why this happened… so if you open it and check it… you may see the same thing…
thanks
Attachments
DRIVER AND VEHICLE TEST.blend (1.71 MB)
okay, when you use a Child Of constraint, you have to set the influence to 1 for the object to follow. with this constraint you also need to make it Child Of then move the driver to the right place, this is be because blender finds how far the driver is from the center of the world, then uses that distance as a offset from the cars origin.
hopefully i explained this well.
Tut, Tut Tut, naughty, naughty, naughty! Unapplied rotations and scales all over the place! :ba:
Here is one example.
The Child Of constraint is set to apply location, rotation and scale to the object therefore it will apply the inherited scales, rotations, etc of the Target object to the source object, that is why everything is distorted. You can move rotate or scale an object that is subject to a Child Of constraint independently of the target object to position it. It will then move with the target object - the same applies to a simple Object parent.
To solve the problem, you need to rotate the object to how you want them, your ambulance is rotated 449.49 degrees and there are other thing like this… To rotate things a set increment, click the little magnet icon in the 3D view bottom bar or hold the Control key when you move things.
To Apply locations, rotations and scales - you should always do this - select all the objects in Object mode and ket CTRL+A - then chose “Rotation and Scale” and then repeat for “Locations”. The Location sets the origins to be 0,0,0 this is good for parenting objects to meshes if yo want to pose them without error. To avoid this do all the rotations, scales, etc. in EDIT mode not Object Mode!
I will have a play with your file now, correct it and post it back later on.
Cheers, Clock. 
I think so… I put the driver where he needs to be… clicked on the root bone and did Child of Constraint and then clicked the vehicle as the target… I set the influence to 1 and the driver ended up outside the vehicle… just realized had to click on “Set Inverse” than the driver went back into his seat… but when I move the car forward, one spot of the driver don’t move, like it is anchored in that one spot, stretching him out… why does that happen… and how do I fix it…
thanks
thanks so much for your help… have been trying to learn Blender and never saw this on any of the tutorials I watched… I’ve never touched the locations/rotation and scales… do you know a good tutorial that covers this. am going to search online now to see if can find one… this is the first time I’ve tried to put a driver in the vehicle and set up to move the vehicle along with the driver inside… I guess I’ll learn all this one of these days… I spend hours a day working on it…
have a great day
Most tutorials on the 'net don’t cover this and don’t explain what you should be doing at a basic level, in fact a lot of Youtube tutorials are not very good at all - try www.cgcookie.com - they are much better. You probably scaled and rotated the bits in Object mode - you should not do this unless you the apply the rotations/scales afterwards.
Anyways - here is your file back with many corrections, have a good look at it and see what I did - just press Play to see it operate. I could go a lot further, but you need to get your head around what I have done to start with. Try also to place your bones more accurately - use the magnet icon to snap to the grid and try to keep bones in line along the axes or the mesh, and equal on the left and right side - play with mirroring bones about the 3D cursor (CTRL+M). Also use the mirror modifier to get the other side of your meshes - just draw half one side of the origin and use the mirror modifier to do the other side. You can at this stage, Apply the mirror modifier to get the other side as a permanent mesh.
I have done quite a lot with the armature - you really need to look closely at what I have done, the Root bone in particular is important and look at the bone parenting. Also pay close attention to where the objects origins are - this too can make life easy or difficult if you get it wrong. i have also key-framed the Child Of to show you how you use this - just dig in the file a bit. 
Keep up the good work!
Cheers, Clock.
DRIVER AND VEHICLE TEST.blend (1.67 MB)
thanks Clockmender for your help… will check it out and will go find some information on that site… I guess I’ve always done my scaling of the objects in object mode… will switch to doing it in edit mode… thanks
am going to see what I can do and what I can learn and thanks for the information on the bones… I had it pretty good but got it messed up somehow later and was trying to fix it but was causing more problems than I had so got it to a point and left it for this one… want to get better at modeling characters… I do a lot of creating and deleting and doing all over again…
have a good day 
I recommend you do these two tutorials - all the way through!
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Tutorials/Your_First_Animation/1.A_static_Gingerbread_Man
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Tutorials/Your_First_Animation/2.Animation
They are really useful and give you a good grounding in building and animating - the only “but” is that they don’t tell you to add the “root” bone between the feet, I always do this and parent the back bone and any IK targets to it. I can go through IK chains with you at a later date if you like. They should take you no more than 2 hours to do and the knowledge gained will save you hours of frustration and annoyance! It might even save your computer from being thrown through the window…
Keep up the good work.
Cheers, Clock
great … thank you… I sure will watch them… been working on this for about 4 hours today and am lost… I redid all the bones in the character and used the mirror function to create the right side off the left… got that in place… but trying to put the root bone in and get it to work… got lost… was trying to figure out how you had it anchored and parented… still working on it… thank you so much for your help… LOL… I do get frustrated at times, but generally just walk away for a few minutes and then back it… I have a bad habit of refusing to give up and will spend hours trying to get something to work even if I have to redo over and over… Right now, I do quit to go to bed, but most of the time, i’ve been known to sit half the night trying to work it out…
I have been playing with my file and reading and searching online for things… went through your file over and over and compared your file to mine… One thing… with the hip bone upside down like it is… I redid the bones using the mirroring… but cannot figure out how to do the control bone and make it work right … how did you get the hip bone to be a parent of the chest… I selected the chest bone and then the hip and did ctrl+P and did parent to Bone but didn’t work…tried Parent to bone relative… didn’t work… anyway… kept searching and came on here and searched some more about origin to geometry… … my problem in getting the character to move with the ambulance was the Origin to geometry… I kept trying to get them together and it didn’t work… moved the character to another layer, put the cursor in the center of the character with the bones and the character in Object mode selected and did Origin to 3d cursor and it put them together… moved the character back to layer 1 and did the child of constraint for the hip and chest bone… (since I couldn’t get the child/parent thing to work) and the target the ambulance. the character now moves with the ambulance… now to go work on my fire trucker and fire fighters and my cop and cop car… thanks for your help… got the tutorial also you suggested will read… and a few other things I’ve been reading and taking notes…
have good day nice youtube channel
thought I had the problem fixed… well, I did for the one… but now working on another … I’ve clicked Origin to geometry, geometry to origin, origin to center of mass, and origin to 3D cursor… I put the cursor in center of the character… it puts it there, BUT won’t stay… If I take the manipulator and move the arrow to the left, only the origin dot moves… I"m lost right now on how to make it stay with the body… My other character worked when I did the origin to 3d cursor… it stayed there … this one don’t want to work … any ideas…
before I tried the origin to 3d cursor, when I would click origin to geometry the origin and the character swapped places… click geometry to origin and they swapped places again…
thanks
have good day
forgot to send the image… to go with last post… can’t get the origin to stay with the character…
thanks
also… question… is there a way to clean up that file manager and delete old images or files … I haven’t seen a way to do that… thanks
Okay… finally found my answer and got it working… now have my paramedic moving with the ambulance and the three firemen moving withe fire truck… sure do appreciate all the help I’ve gotten from this site… it has really helped me while trying to learn this stuff… and I write notes of everything I’m given…
have a great day
Hi there! Sorry I have been away a couple of days and missed your posts. I think you seem to have it sorted now from your last post.
I am not quite sure what you mean by the “File Manager” Blender will show you everything in your computer’s directories, you need to delete old files using the File Mangler (sorry manager) in Windows or Finder on a Mac, or whatever you are using. If I have misunderstood let me know and I will try again.
If you pose a character by moving the bones, say you move the root bone to move the character, the origin will stay where it is as you are not actually moving the mesh as an Object, merely effectively deforming it away from it’s rest position. So you don’t need to worry about the origin not moving as you pose him. Try moving a posed character by shifting the root bone, then go to EDIT mode, the mesh will jump back to the position he was drawn in, then go to Object mode and it will jump back to the posed position.
Hope that made sense!
Cheers, Clock.
Hi… been working on my animation… One of the characters, I had to not only set a child of constraint for the root bone, had to also do one for both his upper leg bone to make it work correctly… but got it working okay… at least for the little animation I was trying to do… was busy trying to create fire for the scene… so just got back on to check…when I upload images or blender files to post in here… the file manager that you upload into… is there a way to clean it out? or do they just stay in there forever… I didn’t find a way to clean out the old ones… maybe they need to stay there for the postings… just checking…
I saw were going from Object to edit mode for the character changes his position… with one of the characters, I had to fix the Origin by going to edit mode to select vertice and then back to object to set the origin… found that information online somewhere… I’ve been reading so much last several days…
thanks
have a good day
thought I would share… since I have been asking for help… this is part of what I was working on… wanted the people in the vehicles … the animation isn’t great… but playing around with it as I learn it
thanks
